A Year in Reading: Janet Potter

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Most Revelatory Second PassIn January I finished rereading the Harry Potter series for the first time since the final book was released in 2007. My first readings of the series’s final books had all been feverish and nocturnal — usually consuming the 24 hours after the book’s initial release. Pushing through the last 200 pages of the series at 4a.m. in July 2007, I was only interested in finding out who lived and died. When I reread Half-Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows in January, I couldn’t believe how much of the books I hadn’t retained. There was one character, who is introduced and plays a major part in the seventh book, whom I didn’t remember at all. The section of Deathly Hallows where Harry, Ron, and Hermione are in hiding, which felt ponderous my first time through, revealed itself to be a well-done study of the book’s central relationships, and my previous disgust with it was obviously just impatience for plot and clues. I thought rereading the series would be a fun, nostalgic exercise, but it turned out to be a singular reading experience, enriching in a way that was wholly distinct from my first read.

Best Serendipitous Literary Connection
There’s a new Little Free Library a block from my apartment — one of those birdhouse-like structures full of donated books that you’re welcome to take, and encouraged to replenish with unwanted books of your own. I think of myself as its fairy godmother — one of my secret joys has been stocking it with extra copies of new releases or review copies that I’ve received, like a hardcover copy of The Goldfinch I put in the library the day after its release (you’re welcome, lucky neighbor!). I rarely take a book out, except for the day I spotted The Cradle by Patrick Somerville and gasped with joy.

Best Read of the YearI still think about Another Great Day At Sea by Geoff Dyer, which I reviewed here in May, all the time. It’s remarkable how openly delighted Dyer allowed himself to be by everyone and everything he came across aboard an aircraft carrier. It’s remarkable the depth of love and passion the carrier’s personnel shared with him. It’s remarkable that there are still secret worlds and books to introduce them to us.

Most Life-Changing
I took Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan on my summer vacation, and nothing will ever be the same. All of the included essays are exceptional, but it was “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose,” originally published in GQ, that really fascinated me. Besides a passing familiarity with their most popular songs, I didn’t know a thing about Guns N’ Roses, but after reading that profile I started watching their music videos on YouTube, which led to watching documentaries about them, which led to reading both Slash and Duff McKagan’s memoirs. Now I sleep in a Guns N’ Roses shirt and I listen to Live Era while I bake.

Most ConflictingCloud Atlas is my favorite book. I await the release of David Mitchell’s books with unmatched glee. But with The Bone ClocksI felt like I was going through the motions. That penultimate sci-fi section — the one that all the reviewers either hate or concede is the book’s low point — really unsettled me. It felt like realizing you need to break up with your boyfriend — like, I still love you, David Mitchell, I just don’t think I’m in love with you anymore. Kathryn Schultz’s extraordinary profile of him went a long way towards repairing the relationship. Hearing about Mitchell’s master plan for his unwritten novels, and how The Bone Clocks pivoted his ouevre towards them, gave me a lot of hope for the future.

Most Aggravating Historical Legend
President William Howard Taft probably never got stuck in a bathtub. He was a stress eater, yes, and gained close to 100 pounds while in office, but I came to like him when I read William Howard Taft by Henry F. Pringle and I’m sad that the bathtub story is the only thing most people know about him. The story appears in exactly one place, a book called Forty-Two Years in the White House by Irwin Hoover, who was White House Chief Usher for most of his career. The book is full of anecdotes about the 10 presidents he served under, and a number of them have proved to be fictional, especially the ones about Taft, whom Hoover seemed to think distinctly undeserving of respect. The authenticity of the bathtub story is questionable at best.

Janet Potter
is a staff writer for The Millions. Janet is a freelance writer and semi-professional baker living in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in The Awl, The AV Club, the Chicago Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She is the co-host of YouTube's The Book Report and blogs about presidential biographies at At Times Dull. Follow her @sojanetpotter.

McCann really has come as close as any mortal can to capturing a particular place/time/gestalt/graffiitied desperation by rotating the lens of humanity across a bench full of impossibly rich and imperfect players.

Joshua Ferris' debut novel, Then We Came to the End - one of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2007 - was a finalist for this year's National Book Award. It's due out in paperback this spring. Mr. Ferris' shorter fiction has appeared in the Best New American Voices series and the New Stories from the South series, and in The Iowa Review and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Brooklyn.The Ambassadors by Henry James is every bit as melancholy and masterful as it is exasperating and windy. You need one determined machete to make it through and at times the style is so overwrought and unnecessarily filigreed that I nearly gave up. But James is fiction's paradigm for the satisfaction of fighting the good fight, as by the end of The Ambassadors the entire world has been hauled into that thicket. I chose The Ambassadors as opposed to the other James I read this year because its subject is one of my favorites: life not lived to its fullest, squandered life, the search for how best to live. I also read Joan Didion'sPlay It As It Lays for the first time, a gift from my friend Ravi, for which I'll always been thankful. And Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones, the collection that includes "An Orange Line Train to Ballston," a story as deeply affecting as any I've encountered.More from A Year in Reading 2007

8 comments:

I don’t know. I was expecting so much from “Pulphead” but it couldn’t deliver. Probably the blurbs referring to DFW are seriously detrimental as they set an expectation of verbal fireworks. And despite a few nice pieces, I think some of the conservative & oddball opinions really left a bad taste in my mouth…uhm…brain. This now reminds me of my present reading of “Independence Day” by Ford….suddenly I come across these passages where it seems like the guy, Ford not Bascombe (though the latter probably too) is maybe, despite his lyrical brilliance, sort of an intolerant and prejudiced person. And despite everything I’ve absorbed about giving a rat about the writer, I can’t help that sour taste forming… sour slime… engulfing whatever neurons should focus on the beautiful prose and character development and ravishing monologue….
Looking forward to Dyer though. He’s piece on the Olympics (in Harper’s?) was marvelous.

I’m weirdly bummed that the Taft bathtub story might not be true. I also know that he was later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but, alas, that’s all I know. I’m going to add that bio to my reading list.

Themba Mabona, I’m glad that I’m not the only one that disliked Pulphead. I only made it about halfway through and I had to stop. It was a while ago, so I don’t remember exactly what I disliked, but I remember the tone being weird and being really annoyed.

???
I elaborated a little, as much as seems reasonable within the format of these articles and subsequent comments. Neither Janet, nor I, nor many other people would call for total agreement of mindset; Obviously & in fact, the interesting thing is to compare these differing opinions. As for aggressive put-downs, it is hard to see how they further the debate. There were some strange conservative opinions expressed in Pulphead which didn’t agree with me and it seems I might have to go back and look them up :)
Still, I’d be interested to know what you think about these books, as you clearly have a strong opinion on them. I’d appreciate to read it.

Best & have a nice day, Themba

p.s.: …just in case anybody’s wondering, not a big fan of irony, so whatever it says, that’s close to what I actually mean to signify….

I'm not an Episcopalian, or even particularly religious, so it's a bit of a surprise to me that one of the books I most enjoyed this year was Alan Jacobs'sThe Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2013). It turns out that the story of the Anglican prayer book is a great yarn: a tale of theological dispute and refined prose style against a backdrop of the mafia-like power struggles of England's royal families. Jacobs is a tactful historian, who doesn't assume that his readers know much about English history or religious doctrine. But I imagine that even a reader who knew a great deal would enjoy the snap of Jacobs's telling, as when he describes an early disavowal of transubstantiation as "palpably crabby." If you've ever wondered why the Church of England has failed to substantially revise its prayer book since 1662, or what the jokes in Victorian novels about church candlesticks are really about, this is the history for you.
It was a Victorian novel that gave me the most pleasure this year. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, I came to the end of Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels. A clergyman is accused of embezzling a check. An archdeacon indignantly refuses to bless his son's marriage to a young woman from poor and disgraced family. A woman jilted by one lover refuses to let herself be won over by another. A jumble of plots, really. But Trollope writes so genially and with such a light irony that one has the impression that one could happily read a story by him about almost anything. Trollope's world doesn't take itself too seriously. "All that is over now, you know," sighs a young woman who is aware that she was born too late to get a Byronic lover. "Young people take houses in Woburn Place, instead of being locked up, or drowned, or married to a hideous monster behind a veil." But emotions are still intense in his world, even if less grandiosely rendered. When the anger of the indignant father begins to lose out to his love, for example, the father betrays it by writing to a neighbor about the trapping of foxes, which the son likes to hunt, and which the son won't ever be able to afford to hunt again if the father persists in his anger. It's so muddled and human a way to come to a realization of one's feelings that, as a novelistic achievement, it's perfect.
More from A Year in Reading 2013Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

This year I didn't read anything obscure and I didn't read any beloved classics either (Sorry, David Copperfield, let's try for 2016). I read what everyone else was reading or had recently read because I kept getting seduced by everyone else's enthusiasm. Not that I minded. I don't care about your Hamilton (that's a musical, right?), or your Gilmore Girls reboot (that's a TV show, right?), but I can get down with some passionate book-love.
At the beginning of the year I read The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer, which was a 2013 National Book Award winner. It's a big, serious nonfiction book, and I try to read at least one big, serious nonfiction book a year so that I can perform better at dinner parties and also win arguments with people's dads. I've always enjoyed Packer's writing for The New Yorker, but I wasn't prepared for how moving and informative his book would be. It follows a diverse cross-section of Americans, from a lobbyist in Washington D.C. to a community organizer in Youngstown, Ohio, to crazy-ass Peter Thiel of Twitter (guys, he wants to live forever and is seriously researching his options!) Packer synthesizes these personal, particular narratives into a larger story about our changing, wounded country in the wake of the 2008 recession, and traces how we got here, beholden to lobbyists, big money, and Wall Street. This book slew me. Despite that fact that it's nearly all narrative, with little analysis, for a few weeks after finishing it, I had a hard time returning to fiction -- oh silly dialogue! oh fake people! (I remember the same thing happened after I finished Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo a couple of years earlier.)
And then I got pregnant, which brought me back to the indelible fact of my body: its hormones, its capacity to feel nauseated and tired and to cry through every interview on Fresh Air. I needed certain books (specifically novels) for this state of affairs. Such as: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. This wasn't my favorite book of the year, but it did me in like no other. It made me sob next to my husband and son on a cross country flight until I had a headache, and it reminded me that fiction devastates in a way that nonfiction does not, because it's only the imagined world that's able to get inside an inner life. And burrow there.
A Little Life is also the only novel in recent memory that I both loved and hated; I agree with everyone who calls it a masterpiece, and I also agree with fellow staff writer Lydia Kiesling, who in her review calls it a "self-important sort of melodrama." Regarding the novel's structure, Lydia remarks: "Moments and decades pass with these disorienting leaps, in a way that, like much about this novel, hovered right on the border between something that felt deliberate and interesting, and something that felt bungling." I concur. And yet. A novel that puzzles me this much is truly worthy.
In my second trimester, I read and reviewedFates and Furies by Lauren Groff. I have read all of Groff's novels, and each one is better than the last, which gives me vicarious hope for my own puny literary pursuits. I get the sense that Groff is always looking for new ways to tell stories, to show time passing, to express human longing, shame, desire, need, all without succumbing to the same-old conventions of scenic conflict and cause-and-effect. Plus, her prose is so shining and unexpected she could describe getting her license renewed at the DMV and I'd find it compelling.
In my third trimester, I read and loved The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, the last (and, in my mind, the strongest) of her Neopolitan novels. Midway through the book, I thought, These books are so...female. I feel like...I'm sucking on a tampon. I realize this probably isn't the most enticing endorsement, but it's true: never before have I read a series of books that captures so vividly the lived experience of being a woman. Ferrante writes fiction that feels as real as the body I'm in, as real as my family who needs me, as real as my ambitions and my failures. It's passionate and messy and necessary.
In the final days of my pregnancy, I struggled to find books that complemented my scattered state of mind. The Folded Clock, Heidi Julavits's deceptively artful diary, the entries of which are rearranged so as not to be chronological, reflected and validated my days of anticipation and boredom. The diary's breezy tone belies the craft of each entry; a few reminded me of Lydia Davis's best stories, where the profundity sneaks up on you in the final line, having secretly gathered energy by a series of previous associations and matter-of-fact details. One entry, for instance, ends with Julavits recounting what she calls an "irksome" situation where she had to soothe her crying son when she'd rather be doing something else:
I must remember to do this when I am seventy. I must remember to find a rock that feels exactly like my son's four-year-old back. I must remember to close my eyes and imagine that I am me again, a tired mother trying to teach herself how to miss what is not gone.
My son is also four. I've had this same thought. I was so grateful to have it articulated here, by a talented writer. Sometimes that's all we require: to see ourselves reflected on the page.
The day after I finished this book, I gave birth to my daughter. May my next year bring as many gifts as this year has.
More from A Year in Reading 2015Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.